🔄 Development Guide

This guide describes the "Inner Loop" of platform development: how to modify the configuration, verify your changes safely, and prepare them for production.

🔁 The Inner Loop

The standard development cycle follows these three steps:

1. Edit: Modify a module or profile under nixos/.
2. Build: Verify that the code evaluates and compiles correctly.
3. Test: Boot the configuration in a local QEMU virtual machine to ensure behavior is correct.

🧪 Local Verification

Because applying changes directly to your physical hardware is risky, we use a disposable VM for testing.

1. Build and Run the VM

This will compile your current Git state and launch a QEMU window:

just vm run

2. Automated Tests

Run the automated test suite to verify network, SSH, and core services:

just vm test

🏗️ Building Products

To verify that the full workstation product builds without errors (without launching a VM or applying it):

just workstation-gui build

The build output is stored in the target/ directory, which is ignored by Git.

🚢 Next Steps

Once your changes are verified in the VM, you can follow the Automated Validation to prepare a Pull Request.